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In Lieu of "Hello, World!"

How do you motivate a team of lazy, very well-paid programmers to work together on a project during their free time... without any compensation?

The answer is, it's damn near impossible!

The beginning of each new project always looks so promising. We sit down with a couple of beers, enter into an enthusiastic debate about our ideas, assign roles and tasks to one another, and create that illusory feeling that we've already finished half the work.

We always dedicate the first two weeks to research. Yet, the conclusions we arrive at never change the initial plan. Or to put it bluntly, the first two weeks are usually a complete waste of time. What follows is a few months of talking about the things we intend to do without actually doing them... until we reach the final phase, where we simply stop talking about it and pretend we've never even started working together on the now-dead project.

Perhaps the issue stems from the lack of clearly defined priorities. We aren't all that inclined to disrupt our comfort and change how we spend our free time. It really is difficult to find the time to code when we have so much TV series and video games to catch up on.

Why does it all sound so great in the beginning and then falls apart? That's the question we asked ourselves. Our answer was the simple realisation that we only do actual work when we are together. Thus, the idea for our Drink'n'Dev society was born: a group of (un)remarkable individuals who share common interests (such as alcohol and/or programming) meet from time to time to hack together random projects.

The idea is to create a friendly, laid-back atmosphere which would deceive us that the work is not some boring chore we must do. Without promises or high expectations, everyone has the freedom to decide how and when to spend their time with the Team - whether it's to work on a personal project, or participate in a larger undertaking.

And our idea has already garnered some serious attention. We hope that really soon we'll be able to share the first coding session of the Drink'n'Dev society with all of you.

'And so, my fellow Developers: ask not what drinks can do for your ability to code - ask what code can do for your ability to drink.'

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